Once again, a reminder that this series (“Waking Up White”) is from the book by Debby Irving. I read the chapter cold, and respond as I read. Then I answer the questions at the end.
I do this work in public not because I need the cookie. When I was lost and frozen in white racism, one of the things that held me locked up was that I had no models of others who had found a way out. For those of you who are locked up yourself, maybe I can give you some assurance that you can be found, that there is a way out, and that it is worth it to do all the work.
Indented or italicized passages are quotes from Ms. Irving’s book.
The first time I saw myself as white—and scary.
This fascinated me, this observation, because my awareness of myself has not been as dramatic as Ms. Irving’s. I see myself as “white” in two ways: one, in that my skin is paler, and my physiognomy is different. But two, I see myself as easily sliding into whiteness itself: I am sometimes aware of the privileges of white males (I’m a white male), and sometimes I am aware that I am using the privilege in the moment of using it. While sometimes I do use the privilege directly, in that I attempt to elevate the voices of my friends and mentors and leaders, and I know that my doing so gives more weight and distribution than does their doing so, I’m also dimly aware at times that I’m using my privilege because it’s so enjoyable and comfortable and normal.
I’m aware that my presence in communities and groups where there are Black people, even friends, changes the feel. When I’m invited in to their homes and to their picnics and to their entertainment, I’m aware of the graciousness of such an act, to bring me into their intimacy. I’m fairly certain, however, that me being there changes things, maybe slightly, maybe a whole lot. (I’ll just say this: at one party where I was the white guy in the midst of my friends and their friends, one partier who did not know me said, presumably outside my hearing, “What is he doing here?” I didn’t feel estranged in the moment. Just a bit amused. And then my friends, also likely not knowing I was listening, spoke up for my presence. I’m not concerned like I used to be, and I’m happy to be left out so that my friends and acquaintances can feel safe and comfortable and normal. It is what it is, we live in a weirdly bent world where racism is nearly impossible to escape from when there is a mix, and I just try to read the room. But I’m usually aware of who I am, which affects what I talk about or respond to, and how I respond, especially in authority and vocabulary. Gotta tell you honestly here if you’re reading and you’re white: there is always going to be a gap between us and our friends that must not be leaped regarding how we speak and react. Most important: we never ever get to use the n-word, even if all our friends are using it in the most intimate and friendly manner with each other and with us. I’ve watched some of us leap the gap, and it is not a good thing to watch—and I will just let you know, you become a topic of conversation afterwards, and you lose a layer of intimacy and friendship, likely to never recover it. Your friends may still smile and laugh and talk with you like they did before (and you will probably not know the difference, so think about that), but I’m telling you, you did a stupid, bad, and destructive thing to your friends. (My friends all have stories about this and while sometimes they laugh about it—they confess how much it hurts.)
Undoing the construct that had held my self-image intact for forty-eight years could be compared to having a cast removed. I’ve had a few casts, and each time they came off, I have wanted to cradle my limb and protect it; it felt exposed and weak.
I don’t see the gradual removal of my racist behaviors and attitudes in quite the same light, but I think I understand it, in that as I dig up stuff in my self (which is a weird thing, right, because there isn’t a physical element here that we can see and pluck out), I feel like I’ve lost something that’s held me together. I am in recovery, and one aspect of recovery is to simply tell the truth. The truth about what and who we are is the truth; as long as we shy away from that, we can’t be healed. So I dig into my own self and expose aspects of my racism, and I feel like I’m losing something familiar, a scab that covers a wound. Sometimes I spiral for a while, feeling (justly) like I’ve exposed something terrible and shameful and wrong, and that I don’t deserve to be loved or included because of what I found. I think that’s normal: I know it’s part of the work, and I just go on. But it sure hurts for a while. I have a pastor friend in Indiana I chat with. We’re as honest as we can be with each other. I admire the man and his faithfulness. He is a mentor and a brother for me in my uneasy walk. And I am ashamed at how my racism appears to him. I’m pretty sure he sees it anyway, way before I see it, but when I become aware of it and realize I have to do something about it, I am—for a moment—reluctant to connect with him. But I do, because he knows I’m broken—he’s familiar with people like me because he interacts with us every day. And he reaches out, and listens, and gives me advice, and is confident we’ll stay connected even in the tough and brutal times. He sees my cast come off, and he walks with me through the weakness and rawness until my strength returns.
In addition to my intellectual world eroding, now my physical world was starting to morph. As much as I understood the importance of leaving my comfort zone, I had not anticipated such extreme disorientation.
It’s valuable to have Ms. Irving’s thoughts here, even though for me it wasn’t quite the same. My journey hasn’t been quite the same, but I understand that leaving the comfortable pillars of white supremacy and white racism means we have to find other methods of support—until we find the support in ourselves.
Though my own face is probably the most familiar thing to me on the planet, seeing white people through the eyes of people of color was what was unfamiliar. For the first time I saw myself as the “other.”
This is flat-out difficult, I want to tell you. Seeing us through the eyes of the people who see us is a revelation. Pushy, loud, demanding, confident, angry, dominating—we come across as ignorant and entitled. We’re first, and others are always secondary. We think we belong everywhere, and when we show up, we think our opinions and tastes are authoritative. Whiteness isn’t a skin color; whiteness is a character of dominance. (Pace Kendi, who again I will get to for my next series.)
…[T]he sense of terror and the spells of dizziness and nausea soon faded away. What remains to this day, however, is a sense of the symbolism that comes with white faces, white skin. Especially when I see photographs of white men in power—gathered around a boardroom or signing legislation—I feel a shiver of dissonance as I simultaneously feel my before and after responses. The very same image that once evoked comforting thoughts like, “Look at those good, important men doing that good work,” now also stirs the uncomfortable thought, “This imbalance of power is so messed up.”
I confess I do this now—I see a little more clearly in photos and in communities the overwhelming whiteness of power. When I look around the room in any event, I look for the faces of people of color. They stand out (and I know they stand out because we are trained to do that: very few of us use any other method to “see” people as other even though other attributes are just as obvious, if not more obvious. For example, seeing a team of males might not appear to be odd at first, and no one male is going to stand out for most people—unless one or more of them are a person of color. Then that is dominant. Our friends do similar discriminate identification, but for an entirely different reason: they do so to find likely allies and friends and safe people. A friend of mine who attends professional conferences instinctively scans the room to see who is like them, spots them, and files away their position. Just a habit.
Ms. Irving does point out something that is perhaps not emphasized enough in this book, that racism is power. The fact that 44 presidents (Cleveland was elected twice with a gap in the middle) have been white and male and Christian is not any coincidence. The relatively untrammeled line of white succession in the presidency is a sign that white men have the power and that white men use the power. Even thought there are more white women than white men, white women tend to vote for white men because it just seems normal.
I think about the 2008 election of President Obama. The warmth and unity many felt on election night and Inauguration Day quickly gave way to expressions of fear by white people behaving as if an invader had just taken over the White House. President Obama’s black skin allowed his opponents to stray from political disagreement to racialized bullying.
I didn’t vote for Obama in 2008. I voted for McCain. My reasons were likely racist, but my expressed reasons were that Obama was foolish in foreign policy, and even though I’d sworn to never vote for McCain after the scandals he was involved in during the 1980s, I held my nose and voted for him. (It was racism.) Initially I was opposed to Obama as a political opponent. (But it was tied to racism.) I changed, however, due to a few things, one of which was getting into recovery and having my first relationship with a Black man. (That relationship led to friendship, of which I’ve written about elsewhere.) It was a gift of God to be in an environment of truth-telling that is a good recovery group, and to be given tools to help listen to others, because I got a chance to hear him speak. I got to know him. And by God, I got to know me, and it’s when I started to more seriously examine my own self—and I saw a crapton of racism. Listening to my friend helped me to learn how to listen to others, and to see Obama in a more positive light, as a human attempting to do good for others. I was also horrified by the open racism of the Tea Partiers and others, and had for decades been trying to elevate the least-racist members of my own political party (but I was never so horrified as to not vote for them). In time, I let down my reservations about Obama and voted for him in 2012. I’m not saying this that I became a better person because I voted for Obama. People can—and do—make their own political decisions for their own personal and moral and even religious values. But for me, I was able to see Obama as human and not as a political opponent. Flawed, not always doing the right thing. But a decent man who loved his spouse and their children.
I can pretend I’m horrified by the way Obama was treated, and then how others are treated today. I was part of that for 40 years. But I was wrong then, and it’s wrong now to be abusive because of race, and it’s an untruth to do so and deny that it’s based upon race.
Instead of uniting the people of the United States into a “more perfect union,” the election of President Barack Obama served as a reminder of how deep in our waters the fear of the other runs.
Something did break when Obama was elected. America has always been a white nationalist, white racist, white supremacist nation. But we’ve had an imaginary past and present that we were all kinda equal, that racism wasn’t really all that prevalent, and that we’d all work for good. Somehow Obama made that break down by his mere presence in the White house.
But we know it’s not a “somehow.” We know that it’s due to the mighty fear by the white race of the Black and brown races. We see this nation as our nation, for white people, with everyone else as provisional Americans who can be removed, erased, and forgotten at any time.
I imagine, though, that for white people who don’t have regular conversations about race with close friends of color, there’s plenty of suspicion that people of color want to re-create the current power system by reversing roles. Replacing oppression with equity is all I’ve heard people of color ask for.
This is akin to Audre Lorde’s famous dictum “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” We see this translated to us white people that just as we have been abusive and destructive towards people of color, especially Black people, it is only natural that people of color, especially Black people, simply want to turn the tables and make us to be the targets of their wrath, perhaps in greater proportion than our own. We can’t see anything other than our own system, which is white supremacy, and so we think that a different system (I hope it’s egalitarian and antiracist, to be honest) will simply be the same thing but with different colors in charge.
From what I read and hear, my friends have no such desire. There are some people in the communities of color who have strong opinions, but in the main, most people are simply desiring peace and prosperity, happiness for themselves, a futre for their children, and a safe place to live.
Dr. Martin Luther King’s concept of the “Beloved Community,” a vision of complete racial, class, and national integration and brotherhood, reflects a deep love of the human family and a desire for everyone to thrive. As I wrote this book, I periodically had white friends and family read it and offer feedback. “Beloved Community” more often than not evoked a “Yes! I want that too!” scrawled in the margins. I believe most white Americans want equity and believe in “Beloved Community.” Why, then, is it so hard to make it a common goal?
I agree that we want this idea of the Beloved Community. Maybe we don’t understand all that it means, and maybe we think it just means we don’t have so much wrath and dissension (and we hope things just stay the same), but the Beloved Community of King’s vision is a good place. A place where we’d want to live.
The reason it’s hard, in my opinion, is because we white people think we’ll lose something valuable to us if we enable it to appear. We enjoy without thinking our top-dog position in the racial hierarchy, and we fear that the lost of that superiority will inevitably mean the loss of our humanity.
I understand the fear. It’s very real. But losing the privilege will actually be healthy for us, in that we won’t be elevated above ourselves, living in the fear that we’ll slip down into obscurity, avoiding intimacy because we have to project strength.
I hope for that Beloved Community, and intend to do what I can to bring it about.
If we don’t take on the task of educating ourselves about how to dismantle racism, both in ourselves and in our communities, we can do more harm than good.
This is a key point, and one that I emphasize for myself. I am working hard to ready and study and learn so that I can be effective and careful and healing. Rushing in with the wrong responses and answers really does more harm than good. If we are zealous to bring change, we still need to harness it with discipline and steadiness, and—I want to emphasize this—we should always seek out others who are already doing the work, and find out how to ally with them, support them, and take direction from them.
Questions
Imagine a country inhabited by two groups of people. The groups can’t stand each other. This is equal-opportunity prejudice. Now imagine that your group runs the bank, the government, the schools, the hospitals, and the media. Your group has the power to make your opinions the dominant ones while creating policies and practices that marginalize the other group.
Huh. Where does this happen today?
List the feelings and thoughts that might develop by being a part of the group in power.
- This is normal
- We built this
- We are the natural rulers
- We are the natural recipients of all the benefits
- Those who were & are not part of the building do not deserve the benefits
- Those who are not part of us are separated from us for good reasons
Then list the feelings and thoughts that might develop by being a part of the group not in power.
- Life isn’t fair
- We have no say in this and no stake in this
- We don’t want to do anything to help perpetuate this
- We don’t want to participate in their power games
- We don’t want to be around these people who are “superior” or in power
- If we have to be around them, it will be with maximum opacity to our true feelings, words, and thoughts
For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
Di Brown ‘Nixie’ at https://dianabrown.net/blog-challenge-waking-up-white/
This chapter (from 26-45): https://dianabrown.net/waking-up-white-the-final-chapters/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/